M.L.B. Postseason Has Home Here, There, Everywhere

Major League Baseball’s television schedule is crammed with five networks each carrying pieces of the postseason: TBS, Fox, Fox Sports 1, ESPN and MLB Network.

TBS, Fox and Fox Sports 1 will carry most of the games. ESPN showed one (Tuesday night’s Yankees-Astros wild-card game) and MLB Network will carry two American League division series games. TBS will televise Wednesday night’s National League wild-card game.

How the schedule got this way is a tale worth retelling.

M.L.B. expanded its playoff system in 2012 by adding a second wild card to each league. From 1995 through 2011, the one wild-card team in each league played in a division series.

Since then, the two wild-card teams in each league have faced each other in a single game for the right to play in a division series. The idea was to keep more teams in contention for the postseason while increasing the value of a division title.

TBS, which had the rights to all division series games and one League Championship Series, snapped up the two new wild-card games in 2012 and 2013 for a few million dollars each year.

Having added those games led to another deal that shifted two of the division series games from TBS to MLB Network.

The deal making over those games occurred months before M.L.B. negotiated new contracts, which began in 2014, with all its network partners.

ESPN, seeing the value of playoff elimination games, pushed hard to acquire one of the wild-card games in its new contract. Each is worth at least $15 million.

“It’s important for us because it’s our postseason game,” said Burke Magnus, executive vice president for programming and scheduling for ESPN. “That’s how we look at it. Being a consistent partner of baseball’s through the regular season, we get to pay it off with a postseason game. And we drove a big audience last year” — 5.6 million viewers for San Francisco’s 8-0 win over Pittsburgh.

“I know M.L.B. wanted us to have some skin in the game relative to the postseason,” Magnus added.

Last season represented the triumph of the wild-card system. The two wild-card winners, San Francisco and Kansas City, faced each other in a terrific World Series that lasted seven games.

TBS emerged from the new deal with two division series; Fox and Fox Sports 1 took the other two. Fox also acquired the right to show League Championship Series games on Fox Sports 1 (and put five of the six N.L.C.S. games on the cable network). TBS still shows one L.C.S.

MLB Network preserved its two division series games in a transaction worth about $30 million a year. For MLB Network, playoff games are attention-getters for a niche channel.

“This is the way you grow networks, to get more distribution,” said the MLB Network president, Rob McGlarry. “How do we create awareness, how do we create more value for our distributor and the network?” Along with the hope of adding more subscribers, the games produce extra advertising by being the network’s most-viewed telecasts each year.

But MLB Network has a disadvantage distinct among the postseason networks: It is shown in 67 million households, well below the universes of TBS (94.5 million), ESPN (91.8 million) and Fox Sports 1 (84.4 million).

MLB Network averaged 1.8 million viewers for its division series games last year — doubling its 2013 audience — but much less than the 3.57 million for TBS’s division series games and 3.1 million for Fox Sports 1’s telecasts. MLB Network will carry Game 2 of the Texas-Toronto series and the second game of the series between Kansas City and Houston or the Yankees.

Baseball clearly understood the networks’ audiences when it allotted the wild-card games to ESPN and TBS, with their sudden-death quality, and the division series telecasts to its own channel.

A version of this article appears in print on , Section B, Page 14 of the New York edition with the headline: Postseason Has Home Here, There, Everywhere . Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe